Christina Perri Artistfacts

August 19, 1986
Christina Perri is a Philadelphia-born pop singer who first grabbed audiences when her breakup ballad "Jar of Hearts" was featured on the reality series So You Think You Can Dance in 2010. The song's immediate popularity earned her a contract with Atlantic Records, who issued her first EP, The Ocean Way Sessions, that same year, followed by her full-length debut, Lovestrong, in 2011.

Perri's reputation grew among angsty teen fans who like angsty teen movies when she wrote and recorded "A Thousand Years" as the love theme for the vampire romance The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 in 2012. With more than 10 million copies sold in the US, it remains one of her most popular songs.
Perri isn't the only successful musician in her family. Her brother, Nick Perri, is a songwriter and guitarist who played in the rock bands Shinedown and Silvertide, and founded his own band, The Underground Thieves, in 2018. Nick also cowrote the song "Tragedy" with Christina for her debut EP.
Perri taught herself to play guitar by watching a VHS tape of Blind Melon's live performances on repeat and pausing to memorize then-frontman Shannon Hoon's finger placement. Once she learned five chords, she wrote her first song, "The Perfect Man," which is about the same ex who inspired "Jar Of Hearts."
Perri made her big move from the Philadelphia suburbs to Los Angeles on her 21st birthday, but she only stayed a couple years before she packed up and moved back home in time for Christmas in 2009. In the interim, she'd gotten married and divorced, which gave her lots of heartache to mine from in her songwriting. She wrote "Jar Of Hearts" and took it back to LA, where she waited tables at the Melrose Cafe by day and made music by night until she caught her big break.
Perri's obsession with tattoos started when she was a Catholic schoolgirl and got the names of the Beatles permanently stamped in a bracelet pattern around her wrist. She narrowly escaped punishment when one of her ink-averse religious teachers spotted the names John and Paul and assumed the tat was in honor of Pope John Paul II.

"I didn't turn my hand over for the rest of the year, so he wouldn't ask about George and Ringo," she told Rolling Stone in 2010.
Perri has a number of rose-themed tattoos in honor of her late daughter, Rosie, who died in utero in 2020 and inspired her 2021 lullaby album, Songs For Rosie. She was wrapping up her fifth album, A Lighter Shade Of Blue, at the time and wrote the song "Evergone" about her grief.
After losing her baby and miscarrying an earlier pregnancy, Perri learned she has antiphospholipid syndrome, a treatable blood-clotting disorder that may have contributed to her losses. She's since petitioned the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists to change their protocol and implement screening for the disorder during the first trimester. Perri has two other daughters who also inspired their own lullaby albums: Carmella, born in 2018, and Pixie Rose, born in 2022.
Perri married entertainment reporter Paul Costabile in 2017. She filed for divorce in 2025. She was previously romantically linked to Boys Like Girls singer Martin Johnson, who produced and cowrote the single "Human" from her 2014 sophomore album, Head Or Heart, and Broadway performer Steve Kazee, her partner on
the duet version of "A Thousand Years."
The singer was shocked when a 2018 USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative study revealed that women make up a mere 2 percent of music producers and 3 percent of engineers/mixers in popular music. She decided to balance the scales by hiring as many women as she could for her own projects. As a result, her 2022 album, A Lighter Shade Of Blue, features Jenn Decilveo as producer, Gena Johnson as engineer, and her then-sister-in-law Nicky Costabile as vocal producer.
Perri is close friends with Ed Sheeran and told - not asked - the British singer-songwriter he'd be singing the duet "Be My Forever" with her on Head Or Heart in 2014. Luckily, he loved the song and happily obliged. The following year, Perri was Sheeran's opening act on his x Tour.
Perri was excited to make her national TV debut on CBS Morning in 2010, but she nearly missed the chance to perform on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno because she wanted to sleep in on her day off. She kept ignoring her ringing phone to catch some extra z's, unaware that her manager was frantically trying to reach her to let her know that The Tonight Show wanted her to fill in as a last-minute replacement. He finally sent her best friend to rouse her with just a few hours to spare before she had to be ready to go. She ended up singing "Jar Of Hearts" in a random dress she found in her closet.
In 2025, Perri adapted her hit tune "A Thousand Years" into a children's book about a young mother watching her child venture out into the world. Twilight fans who grew up with the song were using it for their weddings and then adopting it as a lullaby for their babies, so Perri figured a children's book was the logical next step.

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